Fractal Mode

Chapter 20

magic, because-" She hesitated, and Colene caught the fringe of a complex network of concerns.

Colene stopped translating, intent on the thought. There was danger of some kind, she realized, but she couldn"t pick up its nature. Nona meant them no harm, but someone else might. Not Stave, not the dog, but someone.

"I think no one here can understand us," Colene said for herself. "Verbally, I mean. So we might as well talk freely. But someone else may. I"ll ask as soon as she stops explaining to Stave."

Stave was looking duly amazed. Now Colene touched his mind. Hello, she thought.

His gaze shifted from Nona to Cotene. His jaw dropped. Mind-talk magic! he thought.

Nona evidently was telling him the same thing. No, she wasn"t; she was saying that she was guessing about the visitors. Why was that, since Colene had explained about Seqiro"s mental ability?

Then Nona paused, and Colene asked her: "What danger?"

Now it focused. Nona answered directly and silently, but Colene spoke the words again for the benefit of the others. "The despots rule here. They take whatever they want. I must take you to them, or my village will be punished. They will treat you well, until they know how they can use you. But you must not let them know about your mind-magic, for if they knew you could fathom their minds, they would kill you instantly."

There it was. "Why?"

"Because there is no magic of that nature here, and they will fear it. It is their great power of magic that enables them to hold us in t****l. They destroy any theow who evinces magic other than illusion." Theow was an obscure word meaning peon or peasant; Colene dredged it out of her memory because it fit. Nona"s concept had nuances of servitude, poverty, and horror; it seemed that the common folk suffered here as they did elsewhere, while those in power exercised their prerogatives ruthlessly.

"But you have magic," Colene said, reading this ability in Nona. There had been a time when she did not believe in magic, but she had experienced too many strange things recently to doubt it any longer. She had had no personal experience with it, but Darius was a magician in his home reality.

"I am the ninthborn of the ninth generation," Nona thought and Colene spoke. "I have the magic of the nines. I can conjure, float, attract, transform, and heal. But only my mother and Stave know, for it must be secret until I find the Megaplayers. The despots would kill me. They would know that I seek to overthrow them and restore grace to our world."